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This chapter examines the growth and distributional impacts of Malaysia's policy of maintaining open current and capital accounts. Malaysia's external liberalization policy initiatives are described. Malaysia's external liberalization experience is then analyzed, followed by an assessment of the macroeconomic impact of external liberalization à la Berg and Taylor (2000). The socio-economic impacts of external liberalization are dealt with in the following section. The final section provides a more detailed discussion of certain aspects of external liberalization, focusing on international trade, foreign direct investment, international finance, intellectual property rights, and international economic governance.

Explores how, and under what circumstances, international authorities should withdraw from the administration of a territory. Whereas elections were once viewed as the capstone of international involvement, as in Cambodia, transitional authorities today are focused additionally on the development of institutional safeguards (for minority groups, for instance) that, it is hoped, will endure beyond the transitional period. Other approaches include a phased exit strategy whereby the pace of transfer is commensurate with the demonstrated ability of the local leadership to meet specified benchmarks. Follow-on measures—a role for which regional organizations may be particularly well suited—are also important to reinforce positive results, as are regional stabilization measures, such as the incentive structure represented by the prospect of membership in regional and international organizations.

In early 2003, an outbreak of a new disease, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), caused panic around the world. When the disease was finally brought under control and the costs were totalled, SARS had claimed 321 lives in twenty-six countries. The estimated cost to the global economy was between US$40 billion and US$140 billion. In contrast, HIV has been recognized for more than twenty years. Since the epidemic began, more than sixty million people have been infected and twenty million died. The HIV pandemic has not been brought under control, and the toll continues to mount. Yet, this disease has not had the level of global, social, and economic response that SARS had. This chapter explains why this is the case, by first looking at the social and economic impacts of the pandemic.

This chapter examines the argument that unlike popular belief, the material needs of the Turko-Mongols only played a small role in shaping the relations between the Sui-Tang Empires and Mongolia-based powers. It first discusses the economic impact of Turko-Mongol rule over subordinate peoples, where it considers the available economic opportunities, the administration, and taxation. The next section studies the administrative and financial impact on tribes accepting Tang authority. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the Tang horse system and a description of the horse trade.

This chapter discusses the economic costs of obesity. There is overwhelming evidence that excess weight is associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Current estimates of economic expenses related to excess weight clearly underestimate the true costs to society. To date, the majority of these estimates have evaluated only a narrow range of overweight- and obesity-related illness; they have not included factors such as the impact of reduced physical functioning, and many have not accounted for the effects on those who are overweight but not obese. With the rising prevalence of overweight and obesity, there will be growing effects and mounting costs on the individual, communities, and society as a whole.

To understand more fully the significance of the impact of conflicts, the experience of the years 1739-63 compared with the British and Irish experience of earlier and later armed struggles during the long 18th century must be considered, particularly the War of the League of Augsburg, or Nine Years War (1689-97), the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), the American War (1775-83), and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). It is also important to look beyond the British Isles; the stresses, strains, and opportunities created or intensified by the mid-century conflicts placed in a European context.

This chapter begins by explaining that sumptuary legislation cannot be ‘linked in a simple or satisfying way to contemporary economic opinion or conditions’. It then investigates the importance for late medieval and Renaissance Italian governments of preserving and encouraging the two resources of money and people by means of sumptuary laws. It stresses that the laws stated that expenditure itself was not discouraged for it was recognised that the circulation of money was vital to the maintenance and improvement of trade and industry. It clarifies that the laws considered useless expenditure to be universally condemned. It argues that an apparent flaw in these governments' economic thought here is their failure to consider that expenditure by the wealthy, though possibly foolish, provided income for artisans. It stresses that sumptuary laws were not employed as a useless, rhetorical exercise of moral catharsis, but as a practical means of dealing with practical problems.

This chapter distinguishes between anti-slavery arguments developed by dissenting women in Britain and America between the 1790s and the 1850s. While women on both sides of the Atlantic asserted the propriety of their intervention in anti-slavery discourse, British women working in the tradition of rational dissent began, in the 1790s, by arguing that abstention from the consumption of slave-made goods would have an economic impact that would undermine the profitability of slavery and thus bring about its demise. American women instead emphasized their concerns with moral purification to which their abstention would testify, thereby setting a religious example for the necessary conversion that would speed the ending of slavery. Ultimately, the sentimentalization of women's anti-slavery discourse dominated, leaving behind the economic arguments of the early rational dissenters.

After the withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) in 2017, Japan has taken the lead in advancing the TPP framework via the CPTPP to reform its highly regulated sectors such as agriculture and medical services. This chapter analyzes Japan’s participation in the TPP regime by (1) examining the expected impact of changes in rules and regulations that have come to be institutionalized as “entrenched regulations” or ganban in those sectors; and (2) simulating the macroeconomic impact of TPP membership on Japan and other TPP member countries, using a GTAP database and a CGE model to analyze global trade outcomes. The simulation scenarios show the framework of TPP12 and model the economic impact of and third party country spillover from the reduction of non-tariff measures (NTMs).

This chapter discusses the economic dimensions of HIV and AIDS. In general the poor are more affected by disease than the rich. It is the case for infant mortality, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and tuberculosis. In the case of AIDS, however, things are different. The association between economic status and the disease seems more complex, probably because sex is the main route of transmission, transgressing classic disease vulnerabilities that are largely determined by social context and access to health services. Whereas the poorest region in the world is sub-Saharan Africa, which is also the region most affected by HIV, the richest subregion, Southern Africa, has the highest HIV infection rate. In severely affected societies, AIDS has an economic impact in terms of human and social capital, households, business, health costs, savings, and investments. The remainder of the chapter covers the macroeconomic impact of AIDS, the increase in AIDS orphans around the world, impact of HIV on productivity and services, financing the AIDS response, and debates over resource allocation related to HIV/AIDS.

After examining paradigmatic views on the relationship between trade shows and their underlying economic geographies, based on the structure–agency debate in the social sciences, this chapter proposes a two-way model of reciprocal influences between trade show specialization and territorial specialization. On the one hand, trade show specialization depends upon the characteristics of firms located in the local catchment basin, the hosting areas' image and cultural heritage, and the national institutional set-up. On the other hand, trade shows impact hosting areas by generating local economic impacts and regional development, facilitating the establishment of vertical pipelines with non-local business, and by contributing to the reproduction of national specialization patterns. The chapter also discusses how the link between trade shows and territories is stronger in some phases of the trade show lifecycle than in others, and for certain types of trade shows in contrast to others, thus emphasizing the need for a contextual analysis.

This chapter examines the role of regulatory impact assessment and other forms of economic analysis as a means of evaluating and influencing regulatory policy. It first considers the growing importance of regulatory impact analyses in government before turning to a discussion of the general challenges of using cost-benefit analysis to evaluate regulatory proposals and actions. It then outlines the difficulties of incorporating economic impact analysis within policymaking and legislative processes. Finally, it asks whether the use of impact analysis is likely to lead to ‘better’ regulation.

British colonialism in India was prolonged and deep. By contrast, British rule in Africa, including in Nigeria, was relatively short and superficial. This chapter analyzes the motives, mechanisms, and impact of British colonialism by comparing these two experiences. The economic importance of India to Britain was far greater than that of Nigeria. Crown rule over India was established with brutal force and sustained via despotic institutions of rule. The Scramble for Africa was sparked by growing competition among European powers, but the economic context was also important. The British left behind moderately well-functioning state institutions in India but an impoverished economy, in which the life expectancy of an average Indian was thirty-two years. In Nigeria both the state and the economy that the British left behind were seriously underdeveloped.

This chapter reviews the structure of the Medicaid program and its economic impact. Section 1.1 begins by reviewing the program's history, and discussing the evolution and current structure of program rules. Section 1.2 then turns to a more detailed discussion of the program as it currently exists, presenting a variety of statistics on enrollment and expenditures. Section 1.3 provides a heuristic overview of the economic impacts of the Medicaid program, and Section 1.4 reviews the large empirical literature on the Medicaid program and its impacts on health care utilization, health, labor supply, family structure, and other behaviors. Section 1.5 discusses current policy issues and how they are informed (or not informed) by the existing literature, and Section 1.6 concludes.

For the Netherlands and Belgium in the twentieth century, occupation is a key concept to understand the impact of the war on welfare state development. The occupation shifted the balance of power between domestic social forces: this was more decisive for welfare state development than the action of the occupier in itself. War and occupation did not result exclusively in more cooperation between social classes: some interest groups saw the war as a window of opportunity to develop strategies resulting in more social conflict. Class cooperation was often part of a political strategy to gain control over social groups or to legitimate social reforms. The world wars changed the scale of organization of social protection, from the local to the national level: after World War II social policy became a mission for the national state. For both countries, war endings had more lasting effects for welfare state development than the occupation itself.